Page 36 of The Brightest Fell

“I do, too,” I said. Raising my voice, I called, “Simon, it’s time to go.”

He leaned in and kissed Lilac on the forehead before stepping away from her and walking over to join me and Quentin. “A pity,” he said. “I was just starting to enjoy myself.”

“You’ve been enjoying yourself since you woke up,” I said.

He shrugged, expression guileless. “Can you blame me?”

“I guess not.” I looked back to Poppy. “Can you put us back the way you found us now, please?”

“You said you’d come back,” she said. “You and he both. You will come back?”

“A promise is a promise.”

She grinned broadly. “Omelets for all,” she said. Reaching into a pouch at her waist, she pulled out a fistful of glittering pixie dust and blew it in our faces.

Then, before any of us could react, she stepped forward and shoved us out of the tree.

We fell as gracefully as could be expected—which was to say, not at all. The three of us plummeted like rocks, Quentin flapping his arms like he thought he could suddenly learn to fly, me straining to grab hold of him before we got too far apart, and Simon just falling, dropping like a rock as the ground came up to meet us with incredible speed.

Wait. Too much speed. Our fall couldn’t account for how quickly the ground was gaining, or for the way the landscape was shifting around us, everything becoming smaller, including the pixies, who were dwindling not just due to distance, but due to a shift in scale.

Then my feet hit the ground, knocking the air out of me with the force of the impact, but not breaking any bones. I bent my knees to keep from toppling over. Quentin wasn’t so lucky. He went sprawling, narrowly missing another of those huge puffball mushrooms.

Simon landed on his feet, a pleasant smile on his face. “Well,” he said. “Wasn’t that fun? We should really make it a point to bring gifts when we come back. I seem to recall the pixies in Patrick’s workshop being exceedingly fond of preserves and—” He stopped mid-sentence and toppled forward, the smile still on his face.

“Simon!” I rushed to catch him, grabbing him by his shoulders and hoisting him up as best I could. There was no tension left in his body. He was dead weight, hanging against me like a doll made in the shape of a man. “Quentin, help me!”

Quentin rushed to my side, helping me lever Simon into a position where we could lower him to the ground and brace his back against the nearest tree. He didn’t wake up. Even when I lightly slapped his cheeks, his eyes stayed closed and his breathing stayed steady, betraying no sign that he was aware of our presence. Quentin and I exchanged a wide-eyed, terrified look.

“This is bad,” he said.

“Give me your phone,” I said.

Quentin didn’t argue, just pulled the phone out of his pocket and passed it to me. There was a new picture of him and Dean on the lock screen, this time of the two of them riding the carousel at the Yerba Buena Gardens, looking disgustingly cute. I barely glanced at it before swiping my thumb across the image, pulling up the keypad, and dialing.

I had no idea what time it was. Quentin’s phone, despite being modified to work in the Summerlands, didn’t seem to know, either; the time on the display was eighty-nine o’clock, and I was pretty sure that was wrong. Walther might not even be in his office.

The phone rang once, twice, and I was resigning myself to trying to find a way to leave a neutral but urgent voicemail when there was a click, and Walther said, “Professor Davies here.”

“Walther, it’s me.”

“Toby! Did Raj get the formula to you in time?”

“He did. That’s sort of the problem. We got hit by some kind of pixie knock-out powder and shrunk down to their size, woke up, got re-enlarged, and now Simon’s asleep again and I can’t wake him up. Is there any chance their knock-out dust interacted badly with your elf-shot cure?”

There was a long pause. Too long.

“Hello? Walther? Are you there?”

“All those things were words, and they all left your mouth, but I’m having trouble with the idea that they form any sort of coherent sentence.” Walther took a deep breath, the inhalation clearly audible through the phone. “Okay, first question: is he alive?”

“He’s breathing.”

“Good, that means it’s not the sort of spell interaction where you need a resurrection to fix it. What do his pupils look like?”

I leaned forward and pried Simon’s left eyelid carefully open. His iris had been reduced to a thin ring of honey gold around the enormous black circle of his pupil.

“Dilated,” I said, letting go.